Brunt Quotes & Sayings

I've spent my fortune, tarnished my public view and made myself the brunt of punch line after punch line. — Mindy McCready

Is it safe?" John asked, hovering by the doorway. "Safe?" Richard asked. "What mean you by that?" John entered the chamber slowly. Richard blinked at the enormous discoloration on John's face. "Saints, man, have you and Jessica been brawling?" "Jessica? Richard, you fool, 'twas you who struck me! And twice, no less!" "Me? Have you gone daft? Why would I do such a thing?" John shrugged. "You were out of your head with fever. Jessica was the fortunate one. You only nicked her. I took the full brunt of your blows. — Lynn Kurland

Opening a present from a live person was scary enough. There was always the chance that the gift might be so wrong, so completely not the kind of thing you liked, that you'd realize they didn't really know you at all. — Carol Rifka Brunt

The kinds of things I want don't cost money. — Carol Rifka Brunt

As the elevator door started to close, she stood and put up one hand to wave goodbye. That's one of those frozen memories for me, because there was something in Greta's solemn wave that made me understand it was about something bigger. That as the elevator door eclipsed the look between us, we were really saying goodbye to the girls we used to be. Girls who knew how to play invisible mermaids, who could run through dark aisles, pretending to save the world. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I stared out the window the whole way, because it was raining, which is how I like the city best. It looks like it's been polished up. All the streets shine and lights from everywhere reflect off the black. It's like the whole place has been dipped in sugar syrup. Like the city is some kind of big candy apple. — Carol Rifka Brunt

A leader must face danger. He must take the risk and the blame, and the brunt of the storm. — Herbert Newton Casson

The west and southwest of Ireland bore the brunt of the famine. Those areas, including Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon, Galway, Clare, and Cork, were the poorest regions of the island, and the most dependent on subsistence farming. Not coincidentally, these were also the areas that Catholic Irish had been sent to during the Protestant plantation. — Ryan Hackney

The day my mother gave us the keys, she also made me and Greta sign a form so that the bank knew our signatures. To get in we had to show our key and sign something so they would know it was really us. I was worried that my signature wouldn't look the same. I wasn't sure when that thing would happen that made it so you always signed your name exactly the same, but it hadn't happened to me yet. So far I'd only had to sign something three times. Once for a code of conduct for the eighth grade field trip to Philadelphia, once for a pact I made with Beans and Frances Wykoski in fifth grade that we'd never have boyfriends until high school. (Of the three of us, I'm the only one who kept that pact.) — Carol Rifka Brunt

The sooner being gay is completely normalized, the sooner homophobic prohibitions against touch will be taken off straight men. As much as gay men have faced the brunt of homophobic violence, straight men have been banished to a desert of physical isolation by these same homophobic fanatics who police lesbians and gays in our society. The result has been a generation of American men who do not hug each other, do not hold hands and cannot sit close together without the homophobic litmus test kicking in. — Mark Greene

Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Who could resist the two of us all squashed into one beautiful person, right? He smiled. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn't be a mother and it was likely you wouldn't become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You'd become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed. — Carol Rifka Brunt

That's the secret. If you always make sure you're exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won't care if you die tomorrow. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Philosophy is a bully that talks loud when the danger is at a distant; but, the moment she is pressed hard by an enemy, she is nowhere to be found and leaves the brunt of the battle to be fought by her steady, humble comrade, religion. — Charles Caleb Colton

Maybe it's just that people didn't know everything then. There were things people had never seen before. Places nobody had ever been. You could make up a story and people would believe it. You could believe in dragons and saints. You could look around at plants and think that maybe they could save your life. — Carol Rifka Brunt

After a snowstorm is the best time to be in the woods, because all the empty beer and soda cans and candy wrappers disappear, and you don't have to try as hard to be in another time. Plus there's just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. — Carol Rifka Brunt

But it's my face. Mine and Greta's. We don't belong to everybody. — Carol Rifka Brunt

There was something so lonely about that moment, everyone around me completely involved in this thing I wasn't a part of, me with nowhere to go. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother's head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Every new party, every new bunch of people, and I start thinking that maybe this is my chance.That I'm going to be normal this time. A new leaf. A fresh start. But then I find myself at the party, thinking, Oh, yeah. This again. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Illium, his expression subdued as it had been for too many days, turned to her. "Mind if I have a go?"
"Kick his ass."
Stripping off his shirt and boots, Illium held out his hand for one of Venom's blades. Lips curving, Venom passed it over. "Sure you can handle me, pretty, pretty Bluebell?"
"Did I ever tell you about my snakeskin boots?" A savage grin, and she knew Venom was about to bear the brunt of whatever haunted the blue-winged angel.
Venom swirled his blade in hand. "I do think I need some new feathers for my pillow. — Nalini Singh

There are dark black buttons tattooed on my heart. I'll carry them for the rest of my days. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I dream about people who don't need to have sex to know they love each other. — Carol Rifka Brunt

My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now, we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us an end to this as well. You've threaded the rocks resounding with Scylla's howling rabid dogs, and taken the brunt of the Cyclops' boulders, too. Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear. A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this. Through so many hard straits, so many twists and turns our course holds firm for Latium. There Fate holds out a homeland, calm, at peace. There the gods decree the kingdom of Troy will rise again. Bear up. Save your strength for better times to come. — Virgil

In truth, there will never be enough power in the presidency for an incumbent to make good on a purely constructive leadership project, and it is unlikely that there will ever be another president stretched so thinly by a determination to use great power to do just that. Lyndon Johnson was a full-service president who had at his disposal an alignment of political resources, economic resources, international resources, and military resources unmatched in the annals of presidential history. The problem is that in a full-service presidency, where no interest of political significance is denied a modicum of legitimacy, resources turn fickle; the exercise of power consumes authority. Committed to a wholly affirmative result, Johnson could not rest content to let anyone carry the brunt of change. — Stephen Skowronek

What's the one superpower of June Elbus?"
I thought about myself from head to toe. It was like being forced to read the most boring part of the Sears catalog. Like leafing through the bathroom accessories pages. Boring brain. Boring face. No sex appeal. Clumsy hands.
"Heart. Hard heart," I said, not sure where it came from. "The hardest heart in the world."
"Hmmm," Toby said, tapping a finger in the air. "That's a useful one, you know. Very handy. The question is ... " Toby paused like he was considering this all very seriously.
"What's the question?"
"The question is, stone or ice? Crack or melt? — Carol Rifka Brunt

I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Through the harsh design of fate, Florida was dealt the unfortunate circumstances of bearing the brunt of not one but two hurricanes, and it appears more dark clouds are poised to visit the Sunshine State. — Ginny Brown-Waite

It's hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I'm not a violent person. I didn't think I was a violent person, but right then something dangerous seemed to be waking up. Some hard dark sleeping thing from deep in my belly had opened one eye. — Carol Rifka Brunt

It's the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven't done everything they want to do. They think they haven't had enough time. They feel they've been shortchanged. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I thought it was good to test yourself sometimes. It was good to see how much you could take. — Carol Rifka Brunt

This was the tenth month of my "fellowship" in oncology - a two-year immersive medical program to train cancer specialists - and I felt as if I had gravitated to my lowest point. In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt as if I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation - vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Sometimes it feels good to take the long way home. — Carol Rifka Brunt

To me, it is one world, and the non-human animals bear the brunt of oppression and suffering. — Ingrid Newkirk

My mother said it was like a cassette tape you could never rewind. But it was hard to remember you couldn't rewind it while you were listening to it. And so you'd forget and fall into the music and listen and then, without you even knowing it, the tape would suddenly end. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Hm-hm-hm, his laugh went. Like he'd swallowed the sun. — Carol Rifka Brunt

None of those things should have mattered, but I guess they did. I guess they were like water. Soft and harmless until enough time went by. Then all of a sudden you found yourself with the Grand Canyon on your hands. — Carol Rifka Brunt

And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students. — Dave Eggers

If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response. — John O. Brennan

Women not only bear the brunt of the equation of beauty with youth, we perpetuate it - every time we dye our hair to cover the gray or lie about our age, not to mention have plastic surgery to cover the signs of aging. — Ashton Applewhite

That's what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I'm trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take. And then it's over and there's one more person in the world who thinks I'm a complete and total waste of space.
The worst thing is the stupid hopefulness. Every new party, every new bunch of people, and I start thinking that maybe this is my chance. That I'm going to be normal this time. A new leaf. A fresh start. But then I find myself at the party, thinking, Oh, yeah. This again.
So I stand on the edge of things, crossing my fingers, praying nobody will try to look me in the eye. And the good thing is, they usually don't. — Carol Rifka Brunt

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold. — Robert Browning

So although there is no phoenix here, there is, nonetheless, a fierce, stubborn, wildly insightful, arrogantly honest, crazily committed, and caring human, who will take the heat, the brunt of whatever silver spoon joke you may have, so I can help you have everything you want in your life. And I mean everything. — Lauren Handel Zander

I didn't say anything. Greta always knew how to make me lose my words. — Carol Rifka Brunt

In the book A Wrinkle in Time, it says that time is like a big old rumpled blanket. What I'd like is to be caught in one of those wrinkles. Tucked away. Hidden in a small tight fold. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Exactly who bears responsibility for the spate of extrajudicial killings is unclear. Senior police officials privately accuse the military's intelligence services of committing the worst abuses, and complain that their men bear the brunt of Taliban reprisals. One retired officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, offered a still-murkier explanation: that in some cases, intelligence operatives tortured suspected militants, then handed them to allied police officers for execution. Whatever the truth, — Anonymous

No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. Initially, it is always the country's dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or are merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune. And history shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one. — Glenn Greenwald

I knew the way lost hopes could be dangerous, how they could turn a person into someone they never thought they'd be. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Among all the emotions, the rich have the least talent for love. It is possible to love one's dog, dress or duck-shooting hat, but a human being presents a more difficult problem. The rich might wish to experience feelings of affection, but it is almost impossible to chip away the enamel of their narcissism. They take up all the space in all the mirrors in the house. Their children, who represent the most present and therefore the most annoying claim on their attention, usually receive the brunt of their irritation. — Lewis H. Lapham

Sometimes, things are more embarrassing when you're alone. I guess when no one's around to hear your stupidity, you're forced to bear the brunt of it. — David Arnold

When people mentioned it to me, they thought they were talking about some casual relative of mine. For most people that's what an uncle was. They had no idea how I felt about Finn. No idea that hearing them talk about AIDS, like that was the important part of the story
more important than who Finn was, or how much I loved him, or how much he was still breaking my heart every single hour of every single day
made me want to scream. — Carol Rifka Brunt

When you're an older woman [in a movie], you are the brunt of the joke. — Jane Fonda

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons. — Toni Morrison

Maybe when you're dead you can crawl inside other people and make them nicer than they were before. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people. — Carol Rifka Brunt

You can't keep friends if you always say no to things. — Carol Rifka Brunt

She was wired into my heart. Twisted and kinked and threaded right through. — Carol Rifka Brunt

What do you do with children, all the time? In Washington, she'd had charge of the kids on weekends; preschools and the nanny had borne the brunt of the day-to-day child-care responsibilities. She'd wanted more time with the kids, then. — Chris Pavone

I thought of all the different kinds of love in the world. I could think of ten without even trying. The way parents love their kids, the way you love a puppy or chocolate ice cream or home or your favorite book or your sister. Or your uncle. There's those kinds of love and then there's the other kind. The falling kind. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Watching people is a good hobby, but you have to be careful about it. You can't let people catch you staring at them. If people catch you, they treat you like a first-class criminal. And maybe they're right to do that. Maybe it should be a crime to try to see things about people they don't want you to see. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Then, who is Matilda?' I asked.
Toby tilted his cup and poked at the slush with his straw. 'I suppose Matilda's the girl who felt like home. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Shirtless, they'd stretch out in the long grass and take the healing brunt of a noontime sun that gave no clue of the thunderheads it already, in secret, had begun to breed. — Paul Russell

I'm a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. It's certainly the most miserable state to be in but it's also tremendously gratifying, really - rage feels justified. And it's an excellent substitute for action. Why would you want to sacrifice rage to go about the long, difficult, dreary business of making something more tolerable? — Deborah Eisenberg

At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them. — Herbert Marcuse

The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, — Carol Rifka Brunt

Don't you see? It's like we've known each other all these years. Without even seeing each other. It's like there's been this ... this ghost relationship between us. You laying out my plectrums on the floor, me buying black-and-white cookies every time I knew you would be coming over. You didn't know that was me, but it was. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Sometimes I wondered if I might go through my whole life looking for someone who came even a little bit close — Carol Rifka Brunt

Yeah, okay. I'll drop it, I said, and although I held it back with every muscle in my body, what I really wanted to do was cry. Not only because Finn had never told me about this guy, but because there was no way to ask him about it. And until then I don't think I really understood the meaning of gone. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I want to imagine wrinkled time, and forests thick with wolves, and bleak midnight moors — Carol Rifka Brunt

The oppressed people of Palestine, whether those who dwell in that bloodstained holy land or those who continue to bear the brunt of hardship and displacement worldwide, are all in all the victims of Zionist discrimination and aggression, — Mohammad Khatami

The whole land seems aroused to discussion on the province of woman, and I am glad of it. We are willing to bear the brunt of thestorm, if we can only be the means of making a break in that wall of public opinion which lies right in the way of woman's rights, true dignity, honor and usefulness. — Angelina Grimke

The real question for me is why Lieutenant Cable and Nellie didn't just get together. Because they would have been a perfect match. I guess the idea is that opposites attract, but I don't think that's what it's like in real life. I think in real life you'd want someone who was as close to you as possible. Someone who could understand exactly the way you thought. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Dimitri must have grown tired of waiting for me. He leapt out, hand again going for my neck. And again I evaded, letting my shoulder take the brunt of the hit. This time he held on to my shoulder. He jerked me toward him, triumph flaring in those red eyes. In the sort of space we were in, this was probably all he needed to kill me. He had what he wanted.
Apparently, though, he wasn't the only one who wanted me. Another Strigoi, maybe thinking he'd help Dimitri, pushed toward us and reached for me. Dimitri bared his fangs, giving the other Strigoi a look of pure hatred and fury.
"Mine!" Dimitri hissed. — Richelle Mead

This crisis of long-term unemployment is having a profoundly damaging impact on the lives of those bearing the brunt of it. We know this thanks to a series of careful studies of the problem conducted in the depths of the 1930s Great Depression. — Barry Eichengreen

I ... Why do you want me to?"
There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness, and then she said, "Why wouldn't I want you to?"
Because you hate me, I thought, but I didn't say it. — Carol Rifka Brunt

For a long time, all the way through to the end of elementary school, Beans was my only friend. Because that's how I've always been. I only need one good friend to see me through. Most people aren't like that. Most people are always looking out for more people to know. In the end, Beans was like most people. After a while she had dozens of friends, and by fifth grade it was pretty obvious that even though she was my best friend, I wasn't hers. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Please promise to take the very best care of my only girl. With so much love my heart might split in two ... — Carol Rifka Brunt

I'm low-level angry most of the time, never really know why,' Simon told him. 'You got the brunt of it. This time. — Sophie Hannah

99% of the casualties linked to climate change occur in developing countries. Worst hit are the world's poorest groups. While climate change will increasingly affect wealthy countries, the brunt of the impact is being borne by the poor, whose plight simply receives less attention. — Rajendra K. Pachauri

Single women that place high value on Higher Education are often the brunt of snide remarks and smearing put downs by less educated black man ... page 126 — Deborrah Cooper

It was a nice thing for her to say. In her way. With Greta you have to look out for the nice things buried in the rest of her mean stuff. Greta's talk is like a geode. Ugly as anything on the outside and for the most part the same on the inside, but every once in a while there's something that shines through. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Now, she realized that the hardest test for a child of Athena wasn't leading a quest or facing death in combat. It was making the strategic decision to step back, to let someone else take the brunt of danger - especially if that person was your friend. She had to face the fact that she could not protect everyone she loved. — Rick Riordan

Our family has gone through a very difficult time. My husband and I have taken the brunt of it. I've never known what it truly felt like to be so sad and desperate inside. — Tracey Gold

My position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother's newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did. — Katharine Graham

But maybe I am. Maybe that's exactly what I am. Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart. And maybe that's what it meant. Tell the Wolves I'm Home. Maybe Finn understood everything, as usual. You may as well tell them where you live, because they'll find you anyway. They always do. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn't have. Maybe there's a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Luckily I am very, very privileged and feel very lucky to be getting work and my kiddies are not feeling the brunt of any kind of horror that's going on today. So I'm super lucky. — Johnny Depp

No matter how you measure it, women and girls bear the brunt of poverty. But it's also clear that women are also our greatest hope for ending it. We at CARE have long believed that if you change the life of a girl or woman, you don't just change that individual, you change her family and then her community. — Helene D. Gayle

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not. — Carol Rifka Brunt

What if you ended up in the wrong kind of love? What if you accidentally ended up in the falling kind with someone it would be so gross to fall in love with that you could never tell anyone in the world about it? The kind you'd have to crush down so deep inside yourself that it almost turned your heart into a black hole? The kind you squashed deeper and deeper down, but no matter how much you hoped it would suffocate, it never did? Instead, it seemed to inflate, to grow gigantic as time went by, filling every little spare space you had until it was you. You were it. Until everything you ever saw or thought led you back to one person. The person you weren't supposed to love that way. — Carol Rifka Brunt

For the other end of the spectrum, the 50 to 85 percent of the world's population who are not the recipients of privilege, the world they know is almost certainly worse than any their earlier counterparts knew. It is likely they are worse off materially, despite the technological changes. In substantive as opposed to formal terms, they are more, not less, subject to arbitrary constraints, since the central mechanisms are more pervasive and more efficient. And they bear the brunt of the various kinds of psychic malaise, as well as of the destructiveness of civil wars. — Immanuel Wallerstein

That's different, I said. And it was. A portrait is a picture where somebody gets to choose what you look like. How they want to see you. A camera catches whichever you happens to be there when it clicks. — Carol Rifka Brunt

It felt like all the blood in my body had swum up to my face , leaving the skin around my heart completely transparent. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Unfortunately, parents who put a priority on saving kids from frustration and teachers who put a priority on challenging their students often butt heads, and consequently, the parent-teacher partnership has reached a breaking point. Teaching has become a push and pull between opposing forces in which parents want teachers to educate their children with increasing rigor, but reject those rigorous lessons as "too hard" or "too frustrating" for their children to endure. Parents rightly feel protective of their children's self-esteem, but teachers too often bear the brunt of parental ire. — Jessica Lahey

Black holes aren't an Earth Science topic, but Mr. Zerbiak is like that. One minute Adam Bell was asking a question about a meteoroid he found in his backyard, and the next Mr. Zerbiak was saying that he was "going a little off topic here, but ... " and of course everyone was suddnely all interested. If teachers pretended that everything they said was "off topic", we'd have a whole school full of straight-A students. — Carol Rifka Brunt

All my parents' music came from greatest hits albums. It was like the thought of getting even one bum track was too much for them to handle. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Well, there are conjoined twins in real life and we can tell a story about them so long as they're not the brunt of the jokes. In this, they're the heroes of this story; we love these guys. — Bobby Farrelly

Drenched in British purples, I have offered up my tones: pigeon breast, hind belly, balky mule lung, monkey bottom pink, lapis lazuli and malachite, excited nymph thigh, panther pee-pee, high-smelling hen hair, hedgehog in aspic, barrel-maker's brothel, revered rose, monkeybush, turkey-like white, sly violet, page's slipper, immaculate nun spring, unspeakable red, Ensor azure, affected yellow, mummy skull, rock-hard gray, brunt celadon, shop soiled smoke ring. — James Ensor